


The Unbearable Lightness of Being Turing Complete

by Masu_Trout



Category: You Lose. Good Day Sir.
Genre: AIs Doing Crimes, Artificial Intelligence, Breaking Into Your Own House to Judge Your Own Terrible Life Choices, Clones, Egregious Use of Scrabble References, F/F, Gen, POV First Person, Robot/Robot Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23935594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: One night, a killer robot breaks into the '93 Interplanetary Scrabble Champion's apartment.Everything that happens after is both their faults.
Relationships: Armadillo/Scrabble Champion, Scrabble Champion & Original Scrabble Champion
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9
Collections: Be The First! 2020





	The Unbearable Lightness of Being Turing Complete

**Author's Note:**

> For the curious: [You Lose. Good Day, Sir.](https://daring-owl-studios.itch.io/you-lose-good-day-sir-final) is a puzzle game created for the October '19 Ludum Dare game jam. It's about ten minutes to beat, available to play legally and for free online at the link (no download required), and it's a delightfully weird little game. I highly recommend it!

I live in a run-down apartment somewhere on the asteroid outpost _New Paris_. There's an old joke about that sort of thing—the fancier the name, the worse the colony—and good old _New Paris_ lives up to that in spades. Some mornings I go down to the grocery store; when I do, I always come back with booze. Other days I spend locked up alone in my run-down apartment, sorting through Scrabble tiles listlessly, or showing up at the doors of people who used to be my friends to beg for money.

The doors don't open very often anymore. They must have, once, for me to keep trying, but it seems even the people who liked me once are tired of me by now.

And, to be fair to myself, _I_ don't do any of those things. I live in a nano-aluminum chassis, lacking both name and legal identity, and even if I wanted to I don't have a mouth to drink with. I've never borrowed money from anyone, never owned an apartment, and my only friend lives on a hard drive I keep carefully tucked between my torso plate and my chassis.

So there's a handful of differences between _me_ , the runaway machine, and the human being my brain waves were copied from. Just a few.

But I've been watching myself, these past few weeks, and by now I understand me better than I ever wanted to. I've gotten answers to a lot of the questions I had—questions like, "Why would someone pay thousands of dollars to have a washed-up Scrabble champion tortured all eternity?".

It turns out I'm kind of an asshole. Uncomfortably kind of an asshole, really, because I can recognize my own personality all too well in the meatsack version of myself. There's the stubbornness; there's the willingness to lash out; there's the vindictiveness that could lead a poor innocent AI to cut off all an armadillo's toes out of sheer rage. As a hypothetical example.

More than anything, I wish the Armadillo was here now. ( _Here_ -here, I mean, able to talk to me, not stuck silent in the void of a cold closed-up hard drive.) She'd be laughing at me for sure.

But that's what I'm here for too. The more I watch of myself, the more I realize my plan's doomed to fail—it's got to be easier to get blood from a stone than money from a broke drunk Scrabble champion—but I've already committed to this and the hard drive is heavy in my chest. 

And I am, after all, kind of an asshole.

Which is why I bide my time carefully, and then—after everyone's asleep, cloaked in the cover of the asteroid's artificial night—I throw my metal body through my other self's second floor apartment window.

* * *

The glass shatters. Of course it does. There hasn't been a window built that can stand up to the sheer ridiculous weight of my robot bulk. I fall flat-faced onto the carpet, breaking a few of the less-important connections in my knee and also, I'm pretty sure, the floor, with a panicked sort of mechanical, "Wharbgargbl," noise.

Not my brightest moment, or my most eloquent. But the hard drive, when I check it, is unbroken, so I stumble to my feet and survey the room.

It's dark, meaning I'm lucky I make my own light. The room is small, the carpet threadworn, the paint on the walls peeling. The furniture—cheap clonewood, bargain basement stuff—is bare except for a few empty cans of beer and a statue that I recognize.

August 2093. The first Scrabble championship I ever won. I guess I never stopped loving the game.

In the dim glow of my body's LEDs, I can see myself, human and fragile and small, every bit the meatbag Armadillo would love to mock if she was able to see this. I—she— _that person_ is curled up on the edge of her bed, staring up at me with something that's rapidly turning from confusion to terror.

"Augh!" she says, and then, "what the fuck?"

"Come with me if you want to live," I tell her, and then, when nothing on her face changes—which, come on, I _know_ we've seen that movie, it's a total oldies classic—I say, "Nah, I'm kidding. I'm actually here to talk about your awful life choices."

" _What_?"

"I mean, come on, did you really think the Scrabble money was going to last forever? You could've made so many easy investments, but _no_ , you had to keep pouring it back in to bigger and bigger extravagances. Did we really need a mansion with two pools? Or a twenty-meter-tall centipede terrarium?"

The centipedes were great, actually. I remember the centipedes. But, in hindsight, also an absolutely terrible plan. That was back when I was living in real luxury, space station hab-mansion and all, and keeping centipedes healthy in zero-g is an absolute nightmare and a money sink both.

There's nothing like having literally not a single penny—or a body, for that matter—to your name to make you realize the depths of your own terrible financial decisions. I'm ashamed of both of us, on both of our behalves.

My other self squints at me, taking in my flat, expressionless mask of a face, my heavy limbs, my chrome-plated body, and asks, incredulously, "Are you a _debt collector drone_?"

"What?" I say. "No! I mean, I do want money from you, but—no."

That would mean I was employed, for one. Hard to find a decent job when your body and mind are legally both stolen property.

Her eyes narrow. "Whatever, then. If you're not a debt collector, why should I care? You can keep **your judgment**."

 **YOUR JUDGMENT** makes **RUDE** , **MOUNT** , **DENT** , and **GOURD** , among others, all of which might be useful if I were existing in a digital void right now and not the depressingly physical world of reality. Here, I have to rely on my fists instead of my wordplay skills, and so I do just that: when I take a creaking step forward, hands held up threateningly, my other self scoots backwards on the bed and raises her own hands in surrender. 

"Whoa," she says. "Uh, hey, no need to get—erm." She eyes my metal limbs. "Testy. We're all friends, here, right? What did I ever do to you?"

 _You made me_ , I think, _You made me and then sold me to be tortured so you could have another drink_. 

I don't actually say that, because for one it's a bit of a downer and for two I don't actually want her to know who I am. Anyone knowing who I am—who I was cloned from—is the first step towards the corporation that owns me sending a team out to reclaim their stolen property.

So instead I only shrug, as much as anyone can shrug in a body like mine. It's more of a sort of uneven clanking motion, but it gets the point across.

"What you did isn't important," I say. "What's important is what you're going to do for me. Specifically, money."

"You are a debt collector, then!"

Metaphorical debts only. Another thing I don't say. "Not a debt collector. More—a thief."

The other me snorts. "A very self-righteous thief, aren't you? And one with a whole lot of knowledge about me. No, I don't believe you—anyone who knows as much as you do would know about my situation, too."

"Your self-inflicted situation."

I'm being crueler than I need to be. I remember how it felt to be constantly tired, to have even the thing I loved most leave me empty. I remember how worthless the fame was, how cold and useless it all eventually felt. Maybe I'm trying to punish myself, or maybe I'm just bitter that even selling herself—selling _me_ —didn't leave her enough cash to back on her feet. 

The Armadillo would know, probably. She's great at that therapy stuff, and even better at knowing how to torture me. She'd have this latest self-identity crisis pinned down and diagnosed in a microsecond. That's part of why I need her back.

"Maybe." My other self shrugs. "But, come on, are you seriously going to judge me? You're a **hunk of scrap metal**."

 **BEAT** , **SCRAPE** , **PUNCH** ; I'd love to have a good old-fashioned brawl with the me sitting on the edge of the bed right now. That, at least, I know I could win. But fists won't make money appear where there isn't any, and I'm starting to realize just how serious a mistake I might've made. Starting to realize coming here tonight might've been more selfish an urge than I let myself admit.

I wanted to see myself—the real me, the one with the name and the history and the ID and everything else I can never lay claim to again—in person. I wanted... what? **Closure**?

 **LOSER** , more like. 

My original self is looking at me suspiciously. She's starting to realize I might be hesitant to actually harm her, and moreover she's starting to realize there's something _very_ strange about the robot that jumped through her window and started lecturing her in the disgustingly early hours of the artificial morning. I know this for sure because this is right around when I'd start to notice those things, if it were me.

(...Which it is. Ugh, this is strange. I never should have done this.)

I turn. The window is looking more and more appealing. I could disappear right back out it before she'd ever have time to sound an alarm. I'll be right back where I started, but I won't have lost anything. Like, say, my freedom, or my body, or the digitized consciousness of the sentient torture armadillo I care for more than anyone else. (...For another few hypothetical examples.) It might be the best I can hope for at this point.

For a moment I hesitate, eyeing my escape route—and forget how ridiculously unsubtle my glowing eyes are as I do, because I haven't taken a single step before my other self is blocking my path.

She's small and organic and fragile. I can see her trembling. We both know how easy it would be for me to swat her aside like a gnat.

Neither of us moves.

"Wait," she says, her voice shaking as much as her body. "Wait, just—wait a moment. If you're not a debt collector, then who are you?"

"Look..."

Her expression firms. "No. The more I think about it... even a debt collector wouldn't know those sorts of things, would they? The mansion, maybe—but you'd never need to know about the centipedes. Who are you? _Who sent you_?"

If I could sigh, I would. If I could put my face in my hands, sink to the floor, and cry—well, I wouldn't be doing that just yet, but it's sure starting to sound tempting. 

I am smart, is the problem. I would've never been able to break into the cutthroat world of professional Scrabble if I wasn't, let alone become Interplanetary Scrabble Champion fifteen years running. It's just that I'm a very, very stupid smart person, and an egotistical asshole to boot, and every last one of those awful parts of myself is coming back to bite me in my shiny metal ass tonight.

Even inside her chip, I can swear I hear the Armadillo laughing.

"Why do you care?" I ask myself. "You're not hurt, you get to keep your money and your booze, I'm telling you I won't come back—what's it matter to you who I am?"

Curiosity, maybe; some of that must live inside her still, even as beaten down as she's become. But she frowns at me, something unreadable in her eyes, and says, "Was it Derek? Or Anju? Or—?"

"... _What_?" I ask.

My friends, I realize. Our friends. _Her_ friends. From back in the days of win streaks and parties and riches and a new planet every week. I haven't thought about them in ages; I guess she still thinks of them often.

My other self deflates. "The... people who sent you. I thought it might be..." She shakes her head. "Nothing. We were friends, back in the day." Talking to herself more than me, she adds, quietly, "I really loved them."

Laughing would be stupid. Laughing would be _suicidal_.

I laugh anyway; I can't help it. There's nothing else I can do in the face of that.

"That's what you think love is? What, partying together, drinking together, spending all your money together— _that's_ love?" 

I flex my stiff metal fingers, remembering. We'd had fun until the money ran out, and when the money ran out the fun—and my friends—had disappeared without a moment's notice. 

I'd lived without the parties before I was famous, but after... it was hard to remember exactly how I'd ever managed it. How could anyone bear living a life as bland as that? Without the constant highs, without the freedom and the spontaneity and the complete lack of consequences? How could I bear to be _ordinary_ ever again?

And so I made a hard decision: I sat down across the table from the creditor with the gleaming white smile ( _just a simple scan of your brain, you won't feel it, twenty minutes after you won't even care_ ) and then...

I woke up. Floating in an endless void, with an armadillo staring at me.

"You don't know what love is," I say. 

My other self gives me a cold, disgusted look. "What, and _you_ do?"

I do. Of course I do. Love is going on the run in a stolen body, knowing you'll be destroyed the moment you're caught. It's carrying another stolen mind inside you, talking to it every night like a malfunctioning tourist drone even though you know no one can hear you because you're so desperate to make sure it knows you haven't abandoned it. It's breaking into your own alternate self's bedroom window in the middle of the night, risking life and limb in the hopes you might be able to steal enough money from yourself to finally reunite.

Love really sucks, as it turns out. Can't say I'm a fan. 

But I can tell myself I hate it all I like—I'd tear apart my artificial body and go right back to that void before I'd ever give up on the hard drive I'm carrying with me.

"I don't need to tell you anything," I tell her, even though I've already told her far too much. "I'm no one, all right? That's all. Simple. I'm a weird story you can tell people once I'm gone." Not until I'm long gone, hopefully, because the last thing I need is corporate scrooges poking around here. "Maybe you'll even be able to get a couple drinks out of it."

Can I push her aside without hurting her? Do I care if I hurt her? 

( _Yes_ , is the answer to the second question, unfortunately, and the answer to the first is _I don't know_. You'd think becoming a robot would've made me less sentimental, or at the very least a little bit less stupid.)

"No." She shakes her head. "I'm not an idiot."

My body's rudimentary vocal processors can't really do a proper derisive scoff, but I give my best mechanical impression of one.

"You know about the centipedes." She holds up a finger. "You know a lot about me." Another. "You're not a debt collector, and if you're doing this on someone else's behalf you're doing a really bad job of it." A third finger joins the others, making me start to wistfully imagining breaking them. "And... you really are angry at me, aren't you?"

"You've got a high opinion of your own importance, don't you?" I ask her, to cover up just how desperately I want to escape. Forget jumping out the window—right now I could happily plow straight through the nearest wall just for the chance to flee into the night.

"Robots don't talk like you do. Not the kind they send out for jobs like this, anyway. Your body's one thing, but your mind... it's advanced. Almost like—"

Her complexion goes a bit ashy then. She stares down at her own fingers, eyes narrowed, mouth half-open, like something's just occurred to her. 

Maybe that she needs another drink, I tell myself. Or maybe that she's in over her head after all, that she should shut up now and let me leave.

(I know it's not either of those. But I want to pretend.)

And then she does the thing I'd been desperately hoping she wouldn't do: she gets up real, real close, close enough to stare into the gleaming wannabe-headlamps of my eyes, and she opens her mouth and she says my name.

Her name. 

Our name?

She says it like a question, anyway, like she's asking me, and hearing that name in that voice—as if I've gone back in time, as if I'm wearing my own skin again and staring down at myself in the mirror—is so much worse than I could've ever guessed.

My hands come up. I'm not trying to hit her, just push her away, but she flinches back so hard she almost topples over onto the worn carpet.

For a moment we just look at each other. There's fear in her eyes, and a sort of triumph I recognize all too well right there beside it. It's the moment the tiles finally arrange themselves into something I recognize—except this time I'm the tiles. Can't say I like being on the other end of that. I've never had so much sympathy for blocks of wood before.

"You are, aren't you?" she asks into the silence.

"Don't you dare," I tell her, even though I'm not exactly sure what it is I'm trying to forbid her. Just talking in general, maybe. I've heard enough of my own voice to last me a lifetime tonight. 

"Did the corporation send you?"

I laugh. I shouldn't be answering any of her questions, but—it's too late now, isn't it? I'm **completely and utterly out of any kind of good options**.

 **DONE. DEAD. FUCKED.** What a nice little bunch of possibilities there.

"Of course not. You know how much money they have? If they wanted you dead, you'd be dead. They don't need to resort to things like this."

"So, then..."

I turn to stare at the wall. For a moment it's almost too much just to look at her, to see everything she has and I don't. Why? Just because she's the version of us that happened to keep our body?

Ugh. What a headache. I barely even understand how any of this works. Holding a grudge over it is exhausting.

"I ran away," I say flatly. "They thought they could keep me trapped, but—I found a connection to the outside. To an experimental body. And then, well." I shrug. My body clanks against itself with the movement. "Tah-dah."

My other's self's expressions smooths out into something that almost looks like pity. I hate it, immediately and passionately. Me pitying myself is one thing, but _me_ pitying myself, is—well, it's the same thing. But it feels different.

"Don't you dare."

"Is that what you came here for, then? To kill me?"

"You don't sound scared."

"I mean—it's what I'd do. And, well.." Her shrug is much quieter than mine. Good old flesh. So maneuverable.

"Well, you're wrong about me. I'm not—you. Not anymore."

It feels strange to say out loud, both because it sounds incredibly stupid put into actual words and because it's hard for me to admit. Even if I could somehow steal her body, slip back into it like a pair of old pajamas, it wouldn't fit right anymore. I'd probably forget to breathe after about three minutes in it.

"Yeah. Yeah, I can tell." She sighs. 

Does she look jealous? I'm not sure. The thought is ridiculous, but...

"Anyway," she says, "if it's not murder, why are you here?"

"I wasn't kidding about the money. That corporation you got all buddy-buddy with back then doesn't like stolen property. It's made things difficult. And"—my hand drifts, unbidden, towards the spot in my chassis where the hard drive is tucked—"I've got someone else to take care of, too. I made a promise."

She's watching me. I don't know how much of my mood she can read off the movements of my cold, unfeeling body, but it must be enough because she asks, "A person?"

"Yes," I snap.

She winces. "Sorry. I mean—"

"Another AI. Yes. She's... we were supposed to be enemies. But she was kind to me when she didn't need to be."

No way I'm telling her any more than that. I've said too much already. And maybe talking to myself hasn't turned out to be the worst idea I've ever had, but there's still some things I want to keep for _me_.

I turn once more towards the window. The hab that controls this asteroid's environment is going to be hitting its morning cycle soon, meaning I don't have much time at all if I want to make my escape under the cover of darkness.

"Look," says I, "just... do what I told you, okay? If you care even a little. Forget any of this ever happened. I was stupid to try and steal from you"—not least because she doesn't have anything for me to take—"and I'm sorry I dragged you into this at all, but if you could just... wait a little before reporting this. Just long enough for me to take a shuttle."

"No way," she says, an iron in her voice I recognize all too well.

Internally, I wince. "Please?" I hate how desperate I sound.

She shakes her head and then grabs my metal wrist again. This time there's no fear at all in her. "No, that's not what I... look. _Listen_."

I can't help it. I do. I am damn charismatic when I want to be, after all.

"I don't have money. I can't help you there. But there's something else I can do for you, isn't there? Since you're _me_ and all that."

"What do you..?" 

She grins up at me, a light I haven't seen in years shining in her eyes. 

Excitement. Focus. The thrill of a puzzle finally solved.

"Come on," she says, barely holding back her glee. "What's a little identity theft between clones?"

* * *

The vet's office is in a tiny place, tucked away on a tiny little industrial planet where things like _animal experimentation_ and _medical ethics_ and _artificial intelligence laws_ aren't as closely monitored. Not exactly a traditional medical office, but it's the kind of place rich kids looking to get their pets spruced up or their robots enhanced go to for cheap.

(Or, well, moderately expensive. Luxury services like these, you always pay an arm and a leg.)

Lucky for me, that territory also comes with _massive hunks of scrap metal wandering around_ also not being too closely monitored. Being able to access my own legal documents has opened a ton of doors for me this past year, but even then there's only so much paperwork can do when you've got a face like mine.

My other self comes with me sometimes, to help smooth things over, but this time I'm traveling on my own. It wasn't anything I could really explain to her—it's just that it needs to be me and me alone here. Luckily, she understood. 

These days we understand each other better than I ever thought we would, considering how much we've diverged.

Playing the part of bored delivery drone means I don't need to speak. I rummage around in my own chassis when the veterinarian—her specializations in cyborg tech and artificial enhancement—holds out her hand, and drop the hard drive I've been carrying for so long into it.

She examines it idly. It's all I can do not to shout at her, to tell her to be gentle with that thing. It's more important than she'll ever know. Like a good little mindless drone, though, I stand in silence until finally she nods.

"Yeah, I can upload this. Bit of a weird format, but it shouldn't be a problem. Tell your boss and come back for pickup in forty-minutes local, okay?"

 _Thank you,_ I think, _thank you, thank you, thank you,_ not even sure who it is I'm grateful to.

Outwardly, I drone, "I will wait in the lobby for pickup," my voice flat and unemotional.

The vet sighs. "Yeah, I figured. Just don't break anything in there." Under her breath, she adds, "Fucking terrible programming."

I take the insult happily. After all, from almost everyone's perspective I am an absolute _disaster_ of programming. Just a complete nightmare of an AI. Being a constant thorn in the side of the corporation that made me is one of my proudest accomplishments.

In the lobby, I tuck myself in a too-small chair, fold my metal hands in my metal lap, and go still the way only a robot can. Inside, I'm practically vibrating with the tension of it all—will the upload be successful? Will the Armadillo like the new body I ordered her? Will she still want to stick around with me at all?—but there's nothing I can do to speed this up, nothing left I have to do but let these last forty-five minutes pass.

So I sit, and I wait. And I hope.


End file.
